It takes five days to drive a plastic-wrapped body from the Santander morgue to the Quintero family finca in Pereira. Maybe it wasn’t even a morgue, maybe it was a kind of officially sanctioned mass grave. I had only married Fabio’s sister, Chava, two years prior; in fact, I had just cheated on my wife, with a prostitute from Villa Santana. So, as a bit of penance, I volunteered my taxi to his kid Lena. If I had died on the way, at least there would have been something to say about me. But wartime deaths aren’t remembered the same way as the other kinds. Monuments for this kind of thing remember “the dead,” as if there had been a person called “the dead,” and it’s usually not the guy who gets shot in his taxicab. It’s a little like when my mother, Ursula, told me God was everywhere and I pictured a giant body stretched over every slice of earth, even Australia. I wondered which of us was directly under God’s ass. My mother busted open my lip when I asked her. Dying in war could have made me the face of God’s giant, invisible balls.
There wasn’t a war on back when Fabio died—not then and not now really. But there’s always been something in the air because of the guerilla. Maybe something in the blood, passed down from the first Indian beating in La Selva. Fabio was Fabio de Jesus Quintero Bedoya; he’d been shot in the face by the guerilla for driving a truck. He had a lot of that old, beat, blood in him. My wife, Chava, says he was a Galeano through and through, but he had fourteen sisters and they all said something different about the kind of guy he was. Back when he still had a face on, it smiled smug and languid and handsome. There were rumors, after enough time had passed, that he’d been with his mistress. That it was karma. That he had it coming. It wasn’t anything people said out loud. Women liked him because he had blue eyes and dusty blonde hair. His skin wasn’t the same sun-leathered, working-class skin of the men in our town. Somehow, he’d protected a swath of adolescent idealism, enough to keep him soft and kind and dangerous.
It takes five days to drive a plastic-wrapped body from Santander to Pereira. Our one slice of Colombian Amazon animates every other wild thing in this country with a special kind of venomous mystery. Our air has a way of pulsing and daring inert bodies to budge. Fabio came from this. He was born on his family’s finca supposedly in the pouring rain, supposedly onto a muddy tarp. My wife tells me their mother, Doña Ana, hadn’t even thought to scream. Back then what was another noise, another growl or cluck? Their eldest sister, Rubiella de Jesus Quintero, kneeled at her mother’s wishboned legs and tugged out a bloody little baby boy.
“Something had begun to scream,” says Chava, “perhaps the baby.” When I imagine these stories, I think there must have always been some screaming child, some wild creature enacting a miniature violence on a patch of earth or piece of body. Some hot and hungry child. But Chava tells me at the time there were only three children; herself, Rubiella, and Fabio. The incessant breeding had only just begun. The noise had not yet settled in its long sojourn on their ancestral farm.
My wife told me the story again before we got in the cab to pick up Lena. It was the story she held up in case of arguments, speeches, or special dedications—the minor saga of the Quintero family, the cut of immortality they had tucked into their left boots. After Fabio died, she pulled it out more often than before, sometimes she said it quietly to herself. Her eyes grew distant with every beginning: distant and then very close, very small, very clear.
“Our story begins,” she said “with our grandparents. Before them, there was nothing. We know our father’s mother was an Italian, Clementina Galeano Hincapie. And our mother’s father was probably a Spaniard, Anselmo Bedoya Rodriguez. It’s why Fabio was born with his blonde hair and blue eyes. It’s where Inez got her fair skin and gentle character.” Chava tugged at her shirt, which stretched over her pregnant belly. She held the door to my cab open but did not step inside. “The four sisters,” she continued, “including Mamita Ana, and the four brothers, including Papito Arturo, married each other. They were the beginning of our humble dynasty. We are not comun y corriente. Mamita Ana’s parents helped to build this city. They were refined. They mattered. We’re not like everyone else who can trace at least one ancestor to a field-shitting india.” She liked to assure me especially of this lineage, however ancient it may or may not have been; however much of it consisted of dignified fiction. Before getting into the cab, she looked up at me for the first time since we got Lena’s call that morning and then not again until we arrived at Fabio’s house.
Fabio married the daughter of a man he worked with in the trucking business. She came along and never seemed to leave. My wife’s sister, Rubiella—Rue—says she was the first and last girlfriend he ever had. I hardly believe it. If anyone had taken even a glance at Dolly, they’d have seen she didn’t possess quite the same refinement as the rest of them. Her light brown skin covered a squat, curled frame. And her face, while pleasant, would go on to bloat and dangle from her bones. She possessed the unfortunate frailty of ugly creeping things. And she creeped and dragged her small body all over her tiny city house the day Chava and I went to pick up Lena.
Chava sunk into the passenger seat with her arms folded into her breasts and rested on her swollen belly. The belly softened her, even as she seethed at me and my bloated gut. I felt her anger prickling against my rolls of neck and rodent’s eyes. Somehow she’d put the pieces together about the prostitute from Villa Santana and how a year had gone by, and how another year would have gone by if she hadn’t caught me with her at the panaderia near the house. But such things wouldn’t be discussed until Lena and I returned with Fabio and his half-skull.
Chava’s face is chiding, even now. It has only ever been chiding. Maybe I’m a miserable man, but I’m charmed by her benign little rages towards me. I accept that she is intolerant and angry and a slob, and she accepts that I am fat and horny and clammy. Such were the marriages in the Quintero family: riddled and chaotic and mostly by accident. When we arrived at Fabio’s house there were only doors. As we unbuckled and scraped our flesh against the concrete leading to Dolly and Fabio’s crimson front door, even as the door swung, the home swirled and bubbled as if hemorrhaging memory. Even the bodies within could not stay within, not really. At some point in the years that followed, all or parts of Dolly and her four children would become lost.
Dolly looked at us with her familiar feeble stare. And, touched by resentment for our rectangular strength, she said, “ we can’t be sure who it is they’ve found. But they say he’s tall. That he has soft curly blonde hair and that they can’t make out where his eyes used to be. That we’re lucky, if it is him, that he’s even allowed a name, or at least someone who remembers what his name used to be, even if they cannot say it.” As she spoke, she petted at the air around her where she thought her children should have been, to mourn with her, weep, and touch her. In that moment she might have wished to consume each one of their little bodies, the same way she had produced them. She continued, weakly. “I would go. You know I would go. But I have my heart to think about. I have the kids. If I go, I know I won’t make it. I already know—my heart knows it, my hair knows it, my knuckles know—it’s him, Umberto, even the house knows.” Lena shuffled from behind her. Everyone shuffled around this woman, trying not to be consumed. I squeezed both their shoulders and nodded to the girl and then to the cab waiting outside. Chava did come with us. She stayed with Dolly and petted her as she wished to have done. She kissed Lena goodbye and turned away without a word to me.
I’m not from Pereira. My mother and father and I lived in Bogota most of my life. The year we moved here, was a year before I met Chava and two years before I met her family. Chava hates it when I call Pereira wild. She says I am no more civilized than a boar or perhaps a clean goat. I explained to her about the heat. The heat here unfurls beneath you like a relieved sponge. Water lingers at the saturation point of every membrane and turgid tissue, and even souls drag with sin and penance. Motorcycles weave in and out of traffic, while cars follow laws at random and at will. Light works the same here as it does other places, the dark places seem grimy at night, while light ones seem too fleshy. That’s another thing about here, there is always an excess of something, much of the time there is an excess of sex and of flesh. There never seems to be enough of anything necessary. Lena did not speak to me for these first hours, I imagine she needed a rest from her mother and the way she mourned so loudly. Before we drove onto the highway, I turned down the cab-radio and spoke softly to her.
“It takes five days to drive a taxicab from Pereira to Santander,” I said, in hopes she might give me an utterance. She wiggled her fingers as if to speak or maybe touch me. But she did neither and left her body as it was, slouched.
***
The guerilla lurked within every wooded thicket, like the heat, only they blistered bare skin. Sometimes they appeared in neighborhoods and burned houses. Most members belonged to some liberation or revolutionary group in the country, but all of them had a singular interest in the many ways they could enact random violence. Pereira was in the thick of the guerilla war. FARC rebels snagged children from their homes to train them as child soldiers and adult leaders.
Chava says, “we can only see what’s in front of us. When there is real joy, real calm, real rest, somehow, I only see what is lacking. Somehow, I’m more miserable then. At least now, there is something on, some nebulous war, and I am happy knowing all I have to do is survive it.” I must have quipped or prodded or walked away to screw my whore. Either way, I feared then that she was right and recalled her reverie as we neared the spot of Fabio’s murder.
Truckers learned to spot retens by gaging traffic flow. Fabio had explained to me before he died how he avoided the guerilla check points on his way to make deliveries. There didn’t seem to be much skill, only the slightest attention that incoming traffic had slowed.
In that case he said, “you pull over and wait. You wait even when you think it’s over. You wait because if you don’t you either die or you become no worse than one of them.”
That kind of thing was easier when he delivered paper for ColPapel. Until he started delivering propane gas as well. Really, it was whatever you could get. Truckers weren’t picky. Most of them needed a way to pay back their trucks. Fabio drove a compact truck with a short, open, wooden wagon. It was easier to drive on the narrow and largely unpaved stretches of road which wound around the mountains and through the eastern coast of Colombia all the way to Santander.
Most guerilla members came from country people. It happened to one of my cousins. The guerilla came at the peak of day, not even bothering to sneak or lie or show any kind of reservation. They took him before his fifth birthday and taught him to steal and shoot. Sometimes there were just the vacunas. You usually saw these before you heard them. On our street, and even now, there were twin charred house-bones belonging to either already-dead families or families who could not afford the vacuna. It’s funny now to think the guerilla had the evil. And they did. They had all of it. Nobody else there wanted it.
Sometimes I still wonder if Fabio had his mistress in the truck. What happened to her? Did she die, or has she been locked and gang-raped by fourteen-year-olds the whole time? I hoped back then, while I drove Lena to pick up her father, that he could be a good guy, just for the story, even just for the moments after. Chava told me if it hadn’t been the girl, it was probably a dog, one of the perros callejeros Fabio liked to pick up on his drives. Maybe they were the same.
The morgue man told us Fabio had died immediately after the initial gunshot. He also told us to go. To go and not ask questions. To go and to take these plantains to cover his body. To go and feel lucky that there was a body. To go because we’d pass La Selva on the way home and it was nearly 6:00, when the danger started. He was a good man. But no one was brave.
***
“It’s likely,” said the morgue man, who was not a mortician, “that one of the delincuentes brought him here. He’s the only body that’s ever been claimed—the only one killed like…this. Most of the time they get burned. More of the time they end up here and then no place else.” The man stood far from us. He whispered. There was some confusion as to who he was and where and why. The morgue looked like a storage room for fruit and other harvested items. It was full of wooden crates and black, plastic, body bags. It smelled acrid. Green fumes coiled around our bodies as we moved through it. Gangrene had settled at the heart of the room. Color spilled from drawers and pieces of flesh and bone tumbled from the walls.
I recall seeing a y-incision on Fabio’s chest, although Lena Maria says it’s my imagination. She touched the body first. And second. And third.
“He told me that he did it for me,” she whispered, then silenced herself. No one urged her to say more, but she did. “ He told me he drove the trucks for me. I hope that wasn’t true. Mom says, it wasn’t true. That he was wild and bored. If he were here, he’d tell me to find something hopeful and latch on…” She trailed off and raised one of her tiny hands to his half-face. Blood soured in this heat and stuck like thick glue to her fingers. She didn’t seem to mind. “I think it became someplace to go,” she said, “Some room to breathe— the trucks, I mean.” She stopped speaking and pet her father’s lean, tall and mangled corpse, this time she held his hands. They had greyed and purpled, but they were still whole, still human and whole. “He didn’t realize there’s nowhere to go,” she said. Then moved in silence. Like I said, I didn’t know him well.
The morgue man offered us a roll of plastic wrap, and a little help lifting Fabio’s legs. As we spun a silvery roll of plastic around the gashes in his thighs and the hole through his nose and eyes, the morgue man spoke in detail about the accident.
“We think he died before he hit the tree,” he said. We tucked Fabio’s left and then right toes into plastic pockets. “After the shooting and the tree, then the truck rolled from the mountain ledge,” he continued. Lena held his head from the nape of his neck and wrapped a ribbon of plastic around his face. “Then it looks like the delincuentes just robbed the propane tubes. But they were empty when we found them. That’s probably why they sent the body here.” Nobody spoke much after the explication. One of us finished wrapping Fabio’s left then right hand.
It takes five days to drive a plastic-wrapped body from the Santander morgue to the Quintero family finca in Pereira. And five days to consider which of God’s balls covered Fabio’s face in heaven.